roadrunner
by AdorableLittleWriter
Summary: They both were just such messes. "I want to set this place alive, Zuko." - Zutara. AU.


**I barely have an idea formulated for this. Scratch that, I don't have an idea at all. I'll just see where my mind takes me. **

…**I'm sorry if it sounds very strange. Also note that I'm writing this whilst having a filthy cold. Being sick sucks guys don't do it.**

**Disclaimer: I do not own Avatar: The Last Airbender or any of its characters. All rights reserved to their owners. **

**Please rate and review! :)**

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><p><strong>Title:<strong> roadrunner

**Summary: **They both were just such messes. "I want to set this place alive, Zuko." – Zutara. AU.

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He finds her within a nightclub right from within the seediest part of town and pulls her out. Out from amongst the blinking strobe-lights and neon light-tinted skins smeared with glitter and lipstick and buzzing with half-forgotten alcohol-induced memory losses, and she stumbles out with him into the night, her head lolling to one side, her feet stumbling and tripping over his.

It was all Zuko could do but to sigh at her.

"This is the third night in a row I've had to come pick you up, Katara."

She laughs, a weird wide happy sort of sound; the kind of laugh that comes only after you've drunk enough to forget about the miseries of the world and be happy, even if only for a little bit. Zuko grits his teeth.

"You didn't _have _to come, Zuko, I never ask you to," she says, giggling, blue eyes wide and staring at his face but focusing on absolutely nothing in particular, and yep, she is drunk _as hell_, tonight.

At least it wasn't drugs. Zuko knows there have been worse things, than this.

Zuko doesn't say anything. He walks over to the side of his car, helps Katara into the passenger seat, and shuts the door. He clambers into the driver's seat himself, and turns the key in the ignition.

They drive along the road for a while, the bright city lights of the streetlamps masking and flashing their faces as constant as a cycle. In the yellow light of the streetlamps, Katara was ethereal, a wish, a mess with lipstick stains and glitter paint, and as Zuko watched her head lolled to the side of the car window, and she gazed outward, her face half-hidden within the shadows of his car.

Zuko felt something akin to a burning twist up in his gut.

He was so, so tired of this bullshit.

But he drives on, anyway.

"You're a mess," he mutters out loud to no one in particular, angry, tired, his hands clamped tight around the steering wheel and his eyes staring straight ahead.

He will not give Katara the satisfaction of looking at her, tonight.

Katara's eyes never left the road outside. "I know."

–

Zuko's known Katara since he was six.

Maybe even younger, even, but his memory doesn't go that far back. In their small little town where everybody knew everybody and secrets were impossible to keep, it was hard _not _to know someone.

And everybody knew Katara: the wide-eyed, chubby-cheeked daughter of Hakoda and Kya, two respected figures within their community, the absolute delight of a golden-child. Along with her older brother Sokka, Katara and her family was the absolute picture-perfect of happy.

But then Katara's mother had died, and they'd stopped being so happy, all the time.

When he was younger, Zuko would often press his head against his bedroom walls, listen to the laughter going on next door at Katara's house, and feel jealous. His house, his house was always too empty, too silent, his father's cold fury echoing through his hallways like an abandoned sound. It was a hollow thing, sharp-ugly in its bite, and some days Zuko would pull the covers right up over his ears just to get rid of the ringing of it in his head.

Zuko supposes that was why his mother finally left.

(It didn't make things any less hard to bear, though.)

Zuko gazes at Katara sleeping soundly on the bed, and suddenly remembers that the same year that his mother had packed her bags and finally left for good was the same year Katara's mother Kya had died, and immediately, her house had stopped over-spilling with laughter from the inside out. Zuko remembered it was a freak accident.

A car, and a rainy night. Immediate death.

He brushed Katara's hair back from her face with gentle-rough fingers; Katara didn't even stir, too heavily under to even notice the movement. Sleep under alcohol's influence tended to be like that.

Carefully, Zuko pulled his hand away from Katara's grip, and laid an ear against the wall. He listened carefully to the other side, to see if he could hear the laughter from before.

… Nothing. The other side remained silent and empty-cold. Zuko returned to Katara's side, and stared at Katara's face, silent and sleep-still in the moonlight, and tried to compare the her now to the cheerful six-year-old she had been eleven years ago.

Zuko wonders where that girl had gone.

–

The thing is, Katara in the day was _nothing_ like the Katara in the night; in the day Katara was prim, polished, perfect, upright in a way that Zuko would never be, a straight freaking-A student with tons of friends the same caliber as her.

Zuko would watch her laughing with them, slouched up against a wall at some far corner of the school smoking a shitty cigarette, and wonder how this same girl could be found drunk and high as fuck in a nightclub in dresses too short to even be decent just a few hours later in the night, lipstick and makeup smeared across her skin and eyes glazed with the drug-music ecstasy.

He supposes that there was some sort of twisted irony, in that.

She's right over there, again, today, and Zuko stands under the shade of a tree and watches her walk to her next class, next to some skinny bald dude named Aang who was a head shorter than she was but still looked up at her with grey eyes of adoration. They were chatting pleasantly, Katara's hands folded neatly around her stack of textbooks, her hips swinging slightly as she walked, _one-two, one-two–_

Zuko jerks his head sharply away.

_That guy Aang looks so in love,_ Zuko thought almost amusedly, instead, dragging hard on his cigarette to haze his minds of thoughts of Katara. He wonders if he would still love her if he ever saw her the way Zuko has, glitter paint across her skin and starving animal eyes, and thinks _mm, probably not,_ with an almost sick sense of satisfaction.

Because Zuko knows Katara in ways that other people don't, seen the darks within her hair and the snarl behind her lips, the wild beneath her shiny ocean-blue eyes. He's seen her as a fucking mess on his bedroom floor at three a.m. in morning and has dragged her out of her worst, and so Zuko knows better than _anyone_ that Katara couldn't be saved.

She didn't _need_ saving, nobody could save Katara but herself.

Zuko puts out his cigarette, and walks away.

He'll go home now (wasn't in the mood for any shitty studying anyway, and besides, his grades wouldn't fall just from this – Zuko was actually pretty smart, despite his bad boy persona), and Zuko will simply wait until nightfall and then drive and drive to the messiest nightclub currently in town, and pick Katara up as he had so many times before. Like always.

Like always.

Like always.

–

He'd asked her, once:

"Was the high really that worth it?"

She had glanced at him out of the corner of her eye, and said:

"It makes me forget, and that's good for me. I want to set this place _alive,_ Zuko."

–

It was nighttime, and it was the same shit-show all over again: Katara, in too-high heels and too short glitter skirt, weaving and dancing her way in life packed in bodies and sweat and loud thumping throbbing music that felt like the beat of her pulse. Hands running along her hips, her back, her neck. Her hair was sweat-sticky down her back, and the buzz of alcohol was pleasant in her veins.

Zuko pulls her out (again and again and again and _again_), but today he doesn't feel like playing games. He throws her in the back seat of his car, buckles her in, and guns the engine. His car roars to life, and soon they're speeding away from the club, away from the lights and the music and the alcohol, and the silence around them boils angry-furious in the only way that it can when Zuko was in a bad mood.

Katara was too past _gone_ to even care; she giggles, the sound girlish and soft and strange, and Zuko glances with burning amber eyes to the back of the car where Katara was sprawled out, hair a tangled mess against the cream suede of his car seat.

"What'cha so mad about, Zuko?" She hiccups, and laughs again, her eyes hazy and cut into slits as she squints at him. She was sparkly, enchanting, a magic being trapped in human skin, and Zuko thinks again about how Katara can't be fucking saved.

But god damn, does it take every ounce of his self-control not to try.

"You're fucking crazy," he mutters, instead, and clenches his hands tight around the steering wheel. Shit, he was so not up for this tonight.

Katara inclines her head at him. It was a slow, deliberate act, her neck curving down like an arc of water as she turns her head and stares him in the eye. Zuko watches her from the rearview mirror, and fights not to _want._

"Oh? And why is that so?" She hiccups again.

"Why do you keep doing this to yourself?"

"I asked a question, Zuko."

"That _is _my answer."

"You can't answer questions with questions," Katara's mouth curved up into a dangerous half-smile, blood-red with lipstick in the night, "_Zu-Zu."_

Suddenly the car was braked hard and fast, and Zuko had his hands fisted in her hair, and he snarled, spitting close to her face, "don't you _ever_ dare call me by Azula's nickname, _Katara._"

Katara doesn't even blink. Her eyes were dreamy, hazed with something a little more than inebriation, and she stares straight into Zuko's eyes. "Why? I think it's cute. Zu-Zu. Zu-Zu Zu-Zu Zu-Zu…"

She continued chanting the name, and Zuko growled low in his throat, eyes flashing dangerously. Azula had originally called him "Zu-Zu" only because she hadn't been able to talk right as a toddler, but now she only ever calls him that when she was aiming to hurt him the most – and all Azula ever does it hurt, nowadays. She and her father both.

Zuko was _suffocating,_ in his family, and he wasn't sure whether he could even survive.

"_Shut up,"_ Zuko growled, and suddenly they were kissing, mouths hard and fast against each other, teeth clacking and lips bruising – and Zuko could taste the hard alcohol and lipstick on Katara's mouth as he bit down hard on her lip. Zuko tasted like ash and smoke and like all the shitty cigarettes he's ever smoked on school campus, but Katara still thought it was the best thing she had ever tasted and _my god was that his tongue–_

They broke away panting, staring into each other's eyes as they pressed their foreheads together, the roar of traffic around them going by. "You're such a mess," Zuko mutters, eyes creased as he stares down at her, her blue eyes startlingly close.

Katara laughs breathlessly, oblivious to the sounds of honking engines in the night. "So are you."

–

"So it was the anniversary of the day you mom left, huh," Katara said quietly, sitting next to Zuko and staring up at the blue wall of his ceiling, hands around her knees, head tipped back against his bed.

A night after, and Zuko and Katara were talking; and Katara was probably more sober tonight than she had been on any other nights before.

"Yeah," Zuko's voice was hushed, a whisper in the moonlight, and Katara glances over at him out of the corner of her eye. His hair was washed silver in the dark, and Katara reaches over and tucks a few strands of it behind his ear. Zuko does not even react.

"My entire family's fallen apart a long, long time ago," he confesses, closing his eyes and tipping his head back, the pale line of his jaw dipping shadows at his collarbones, hungry-wide and gaping. "Ever since my mom left. Or way before that, really."

The both of them sat together in silence for a few heartbeats, breathing comfortably together in tandem in the darkness.

"…We're such a fucking mess," Katara laughs, softly, shaking her head so that her dark brown curls fell away from the bed to fall loose around her face. Zuko watched the movement like a half-starving man, but does not say anything. He waits.

"…I want to get away from here, Zuko," Katara said, closing her eyes, face drawn and more tired and more exhausted than Zuko had ever seen her, and Zuko finally thinks he understands, just a little bit, on why Katara gets herself completely trashed almost every single night without telling people why.

Just a little bit.

"Everything here hurts now, ever since mom died, and– and everything here is so familiar that it _hurts,_ Zuko. Small town isn't my thing, it was never my thing, nothing ever happens around here – and now, walking around this place where everybody knows everybody and where everybody knows of mom's death and how _everything_ here reminds me of it – it's killing me, Zuko, bit by bit. _It's killing me._"

Katara opens her eyes to gaze at Zuko, eyes wide and earnest for the first time in so many years, and Zuko wants to lean in and kiss her close. "I _hate _this place."

"You know you can, right," Zuko's words were little more than a breath of air right now, and _listen, listen Katara, this is the sound of me letting go. _"Get away, that is.

"Nobody is stopping you." _Not Sokka, not your father, not your friends, not even me. _

Katara simply looks at him for a long, long time.

"Thank you," she says, finally, and leans in to kiss him; it was slow and soft and sweet, and lingered like a farewell when Katara pulled away. She smiled, as she stood up to go.

"I'll see you around."

Zuko watched the door click shut behind her, and didn't say a word.

–

She was gone by the next morning. Zuko didn't even blame her.

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><p><strong>I scrapped ideas for this twice, you don't understand. <strong>

**This seems very out-of-character for both Zuko and Katara… well erm. I don't know what's happening in this one I'm sorry. Also I wrote this entire thing out in basically a night yeah how's that for productivity. I'm not sure about how this flows though my cold is severely impairing my judgment. Especially for the last bit. **

** Please rate and review! :)**


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